XNA Community Games – Hell Yeah!!

When Microsoft announced it’s first version of it’s XNA game development engine, I was impressed. It ran well, and it allowed me to make some cool demos with C#. And the fact that it could run on Xbox 360 natively gave it a bit of a wow factor. But I wasn’t rooting for it 100%, due to the fact that in order to play your creation on Xbox 360, you had to have a 100 dollar a year subscription to the XNA Creators Club. Not only that, if you wanted to share your game to other Xbox players, they had to have the same subscription. So I ran through a few tutorials, made a couple demos, and shelved it.

Fast forward to about two months ago, Microsoft announced it’s sophomore version of XNA, this time opening the development platform to*any* .NET compliant language (let’s see, that’s C#, VB, JScript, Python, Cobol, Pascal, etc). Nice. And they allowed for multiplayer support via Xbox Live. Nice again, however now my friends have to have both a Creator’s Club $100 license *AND* a Xbox Live Gold account. Not impressed at all. So once again, fell on deaf ears.

Now, just a few days ago, Microsoft just announced it’s Community Games initiative. When the service goes out of beta (hopefully sometime this spring), a developer with a Creator’s Club license can publish a game for peer-review by other Creator’s Club members. If a peer reviews the game and passes it (no bugs or inappropriate/copyright infringing content), the developer can publish his own game on Xbox Live Arcade for *anyone* to download and play, for free or pay($$$). Anyone as in anyone who has an Xbox 360, an internet connection, and a pulse. No Creator’s Club license required. And did I mention, you can sell your game for money????? This is huge. Microsoft is changing its policy on game distribution from an iron fist to loose hands. It’s like every .NET developer will be handed an Xbox Live Arcade publishing contract (well for $100/yr, and a peer test). This is the day and age ladies and gentlemen. No longer do you have to either try to woo over a game publisher that usually doesn’t give a damn about you, your game or your well-being. Microsoft has opened the flood gates for developers everywhere to start profiting from their creations, without all the red tape of trying to get a contract, or trying to sell their game off their website. This is *HUGE*.

All I know is, I’m dusting off my XNA Unleashed book I bought a few months back. Several years back I was part of a group of people that shared my passion for video games, and we always dreamed of the idea of creating a compelling game, or an array of games actually, and achieving commercial success. Unfortunately due to the our naiveness (for the most part because we were so young), and the lack of a chance by the video game industry, we got discouraged after a few years, went our separate ways, and haven’t spoken of it since. But this….now, this is the chance that I wish we had back then. This is what is going to do to the game industry what Mp3/iTunes did for the music industry. .NET taught us that we can write compelling software w/o the woes of unmanaged languages like C++ (shudders at the thought of pointers), XNA taught us that a small group of 1-5 developers can make games that can rival the efforts of multi-million dollar software development houses, and now Xbox Live Arcade is going to teach us that anyone with a great idea, some code know how, and some modeling software and expertise, $100, and some serious fuckin passion can make a game and publish it to the world, and potentially sell millions.

So with that being said, I’ll be off to refresh my knowledge of XNA. I think I want to make an RPG. Sound good to you? Feel free to comment below.

P.S. In case you are interested in what XNA can do (on both PC and XB360), check out this video. And trust me, compared to the way games were made in the past, making games like this is incredibly easy.

Shining Force III Translation Project

Now, I know this is not late breaking news, but I find it to be blogworthy nonetheless. Remember this game for the Sega Saturn?

 

If you are a Shining Force fan, you probably remember it, if not, well, then just go back to your Final Fantasies (NOTE: I like Final Fantasy as much as the next RPG fan, I just don’t think it’s the be all end all RPG that all these fanboys croon about). Anyway, this game was released in 1998, in the US and Europe as, well….Shining Force III. What the dim-witted company know as SEGA didn’t tell us was that particular game we got was only 1 episode out of three (which explained the lame ending), they decided (like other great japanese rpgs like Grandia and Lunar), that America didn’t need the other two games, since according to at the time Sega of America douchebag exec Bernie Stolar, “Americans aren’t really into RPGs”. Prick. And in fact, in retrospect, the Scenario 1 we got didn’t have all that great of a translation either, now that I think about it. But alas, we got what we got. 

 

So as much as fans in the Western World booed and hissed and bitched to Sega about it for the last 10 years, not a damn thing has been done about it. All pleadings to port these games to a new console (DS or PSP would’ve been nice) has fallen upon deaf ears. So, luckily a few fans decided to translate the game a couple years ago, and finally fans had a text to read along to while they played the japanese version…..Meh……

 

Enter knightOfDragon and his team of misfits. Much like Neil Corlett brought us the translation patch for Seiken Densetsu 3(Sequel to Secret of Mana, thanks Square/Nintendo. You fucks), they have brought us patches for Scenario 2 and 3, and even the Premium Disk for the Eng-rish speaking world. They even re-translated the JPN version of Scenario 1 (such nice guys). So here’s the post (they don’t have a site), and here’s where to get the files. And you get an English copy of Shining Force III Scenario 2 and 3, and PD in a few easy steps:

1: Go buy Scenario 2 and 3(Around $50-60 on Ebay at the moment).

3. Stick one of the discs in your CD drive.

3. Download SF3Patch.exe from the above site.

4. Specify which game you’re patching and follow the instructions to make an iso of the patched game.

5. Now you can either mount the ISO for an emulator, or burn the ISO for a chipped Saturn.

 

And that’s it. And finally, you can see the ending to such an amazingly epic story that modern day RPG’s could only dream of having. And if you’ve never played a Shining Force, you can finally find out that Final Fantasy VII is NOT the greatest game ever made, and start seeing that there’s talent outside of Squeenix (and as of late, ALOT more talent).

 

 

 

 

 

Fun with WPF

Being a .NET developer of sorts, I have always been interested in WPF. I think it’s an interesting platform for building applications of the futiure. In case you’ve been living under a rock, WPF is Windows Presentation Foundation, which allows developers to build applications using DirectX as the hardware rendering, allowing visual aesthetics previously allowed only in games to be used in business applications. Meaning 2D effects, 3D, media, and the like. Hell if you wanted to make an application that looked like one of the consoles on the U.S.S. Enterprise, you could(sorry, geeky Star Trek reference). Gone are the days of the standard hokey grey window with the same standard grey buttons and the standard File/Edit/Window/Help menus. While this is great news to a developer such as me, unfortunately it’s not so easy to blow over with my company, who has the hardest time adopting to new technology (Unfortunately, it’s a by-product of working for a non-technology based company). Anyway, I decided to learn it anyway. The nifty part of all this is that it used an HTML like syntax for it’s declarative programming(meaning the visual elements) called XAML, or extensible Application Markup Language. For example:

<Window xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation”

Title=”Window1″ Height=”317″ Width=”482″>

<StackPanel x:Name=”StackPanel1″>

<Button Click=”Button_Click” Height=”200″ Width=”300″ Content=”Button 2″ />

</StackPanel>

</Window>

would put a button on the screen named “Button 2″. IF you have the .NET 3.0 Framework installed(or are running lousy Vista), you should be able to enter this code in Notepad, save it as a .XAML file, and run it in Internet Explorer as is.

If you’re familiar with HTML, this should look somewhat familiar. Personally, I’m thrilled and hope this takes over HTML as the standard, since I hate HTML with a brutal passion.

Anyway, if you are a .NET developer and are interested in such things, there is an entire webcast series done by William Steele of Microsoft fame called WPF Soup to Nuts. And if you don’t know a .NET language and want to (C# or VB.NET), they have instructional videos on that too.

Before the Dawn

Okay, so if you read my About Me section, I mentioned I’m a huge metal fan, especially Melodic Death Metal. And as we all know, the majority of such music tends to come from Sweden, and lately it’s been really fuckin boring. If I have to hear another band that sounds like In Flames or At the Gates or the like, I’m going to scream. But I happened to stumble across this band the other day, and I am liking their newest album, Deadsong. Now, I can’t say they aren’t any different from your usual Generic Gothenburg Sounding band (which I guess isn’t the best title for them since they are Finnish), but I have to say it’s some catchy stuff. Anyway, you can listen to them on their site, and let me know what you think.

Lost Odyssey

Yesterday I picked up Lost Odyssey…. and I must say the circles around my eyes have started to grow. I could barely finish my workout this morning. I think we have a masterpiece on our hands, ladies and gentlemen.

Ok, if you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about, here’s the details: Lost Odyssey is an traditional RPG for the Xbox 360 from Mistwalker. What is significant about Mistwalker is it is headed by none other than Final Fantasy creator/Square-Enix-slave Hironobu Sakaguchi. Also among his legion is Nobuo Uematsu, the original composer for Final Fantasy. So, with these two on board, one would expect a game that could stand toe to toe with the Final Fantasy series. Well, earlier last year, the world was hopeful with the debut of Blue Dragon. I remember I bought it the day it came out: $60 game and $20 guide. I even reserved it at Gamestop too, something I hardly ever do. I don’t think I could describe the sheer disappointment I felt within the first five minutes of playing. I felt like this was a Fischer-Price RPG. Five characters, the archenemy is a pansy old man named Nene (yes, which sounds like nay-nay), and the characters looked straight out of a Dragonball Z episode (of course, this is because the main artist was Akira Toriyama, but still). I mean hell, the main character looked like Gohan, or whatever his name is. Needless to say, I’m sure the execs at Square-Enix were laughing their asses off when they saw this game, saying “This is why we fired him”, and I was incredibly disappointed in one of my favorite storytellers of all time. So I started reading up on Lost Odyssey, story sounded interesting. So I reserved and paid it off again. And I prayed that I wouldn’t be disappointed….

…And I wasn’t. If you are an fan of Final Fantasy, you will love this game. If you are a fan of RPG’s, you will love this game. If you like stories that are moving and leave you begging for more, you will love this game. If you thought Final Fantasy XII was a disappointment in the story department, you will love this game. This game in my opinion, is what Final Fantasy XII should have been. If you’ve been living under a rock in Africa for the past few years, here’s the short edition: Lost Odyssey tells the story of a man named Kaim Argonar, who has lived for 1,000 years and has lost all his memories. He slowly begins to remember as the game progresses, and gets caught up in a political struggle in a world blessed (and scarred) by magic-powered technology.

Needless to say, it’s a pretty epic story. The battle system is pretty much traditional turn-based, not overly innovative, but who gives a shit? If you love Final Fantasy like I love Final Fantasy, you’re not overly crazed by new battle systems, it’s the story that gets you. And Lost Odyssey delivers on story, maybe even a little too much sometimes. Basically, there are parts of the game where Kaim will regain his memory in the form of dreams, which are about a 5-10 minute text read (yes I said read, hard to believe in this day and age of gaming). If you can tolerate the annoyance of having to read a chapter of text at a time, you’ll find these stories tugging at your heartstrings, as they are beautifully crafted. But aside from these drawn out reading sequences(and they are a bit frequent), this game will blow your mind. If you enjoy classic RPG style gaming, with modern technological advancements in graphics, you will love this game.

Just the beginning…

Okay, since this is the first post of my blog, I’m not really going to say much here. This is my new space for relaying my thoughts, feelings, and just everyday rants. Hope you will join me on the ride.